In two years' time, a big-time Indonesian heroin smuggler will become eligible for parole in the Australian prison system. If it is granted, he'll be taken to the airport and flown back home to his family.
Kristito Mandagi is one of three Indonesians who, like condemned Bali nine members Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan, were caught trying to import heroin to Australia.
Unlike the Australian pair, they were lucky to have been caught by the Australian police, not by those in Bali.
They are particularly lucky because their heroin importation was 47 times bigger than Chan's and Sukumaran's.
Kristito, Saud Siregar and Ismunandar were the captain, the chief officer and the engineer of a boat carrying a staggering 390 kilograms of street-ready drugs and a loaded Glock pistol to a beach near Port Macquarie in NSW.
At the time, the haul, found in 31 designer sports bags, was Australia's largest drug bust.
The drugs, of which the pure heroin component weighed 252.3 kilograms, was worth $400 to $600 million on the street.
Their specially modified boat, the Uniana, with long-range fuel tanks, made the Bali nine's plastic bags, sticky-tape and mules venture at Bali airport look like amateur hour.
But instead of readying themselves to be taken out at dawn and their bodies riddled with bullets – the fate now facing Chan and Sukumaran – the three Indonesians are starting to think about heading home.
They have spent their sentences in Australian prisons in what even they concede is relative comfort.
In an interview in Indonesia's Tempo magazine in 2012, Ismunandar admitted he had little to complain about, citing Lithgow prison's fitness centre and a work scheme in which he could earn $40 a week.
The men were caught in 1998 in an operation that involved 76 Federal, NSW and Customs officers, a PolAir helicopter, two police vessels, the RAN frigate HMAS Bendigo and two Customs ships.
"This was a well-planned, efficiently executed criminal enterprise and ... Mandagi was the pivotal figure," NSW District Court Judge Kenneth Shadbolt said during sentencing in 2000.
"It was a crime of massive proportion ... the nature of the crime and its circumstances makes it one of the gravest of its type."
All three pleaded not guilty, but Mandagi got life with a non-parole period of 25 years.
The other two received 20-year sentences – the same as Schapelle Corby for her boogie board bag of 4.7 kilograms of marijuana.
Eight other Indonesians on the boat were never tried, and were sent home because police could not prove they knew of the drugs. Mandagi appealed and had six years knocked off his sentence.
He will be eligible for parole in October 2017. The other two can apply a year later.
They have had regular visits from Indonesia's consular officials. But in 2012, something so outrageous happened that they felt compelled to complain to anyone who would listen.
It was unfair, they insisted, that Corby had been granted clemency and a five-year sentence cut when the Australian government showed them no mercy at all.
"If only the Indonesian government had urged the Australian government to forgive us instead of cutting Corby's sentence, then I'd be a free man," Ismanandar told a Tempo magazine journalist in a prison interview.
A series of sympathetic stories in the Indonesian press followed, most of which failed to spell out the epic size of the men's haul.
So upset was Ismanandar that, in mid-October 2013, when then Indonesian law and human rights minister Amir Syamsuddin came to Australia for face-to-face meetings on people-smuggling with Attorney-General George Brandis and immigration minister Scott Morrison, Mr Amir made a side visit to the prison near Wollongong to hear the man's complaints.
"He wanted to express his anger and anxiety," Mr Amir told Fairfax Media. "Every time he saw on TV how we had treated Schapelle Corby, how we gave her a sentence reduction ... he was asking why he hadn't received the same treatment in Australia."
Mr Amir explained to him that the justice systems were different, and clemency did not exist in Australia. Then went on to give his countryman a reality check.
"With 300 kilograms of heroin, he would have received the death sentence squared if he'd been caught in Indonesia, a very severe sentence," the minister said.
"And I explained to him that it was very difficult to find a comparison for his offence, because I know the Bali nine had only a few kilograms."
